Why you should bet on Azure for your infrastructure needs, today and in the future

Oracle:

The ability to make grants on objects in the database such as tables, views, procedures or others such as SELECT, DELETE, EXECUTE and more is the cornerstone of giving other users or schemas granular access to objects.

While clients tend to tell developers to skip wireframing and prototyping, seasoned veterans tell newbies that they can skip wireframing and proceed with prototyping.

Part of my team is here in Palo Alto and I’m visiting for a few days this week. You know, for all the remote work I’ve done over the years, I still really value this in-person, face-to-face time. These little trips from Seattle to other locations where my teammates physically sit are important to me.

This is also part of the reason I enjoy user groups and conferences so much. They’re opportunities to meet with other PostgreSQL users in real life. In fact – at this very moment – one of the most important PostgreSQL conferences in the world is happening: PgCon! Having attended a few other conferences over the past year, I’m holding down the fort in the office this week in order to send a bunch of other teammates… but you can be sure I’m keeping an eye on Twitter. :)

In the meantime, let’s get busy with the latest updates from the postgresql virtual world. First of all, I think the biggest headline is that (just in time for pgcon) we have the first official beta version of PostgreSQL 11! The release announcement headlines with major partitioning enhancements, more parallelism, a feature to speed up SQL execution by compiling certain operations on-demand into native machine code (JIT/Just-In-Time compilation), and numerous SQL enhancements. You can also read the first draft of the release notes. This is the time to start testing and give feedback to the development community!

Closely related to this, there’s one other really big headline that I’m excited about: the new AWS RDS Preview Environment. You can now try out the new pg11 features ahead of time with a single click! In part, because the development community is so awesome, the first database available in the RDS Preview Environment is PostgreSQL. And the official PostgreSQL 11 beta release is _already_ available on RDS!! Personally, I’m hoping that this benefits the community by getting more people to test and give feedback on new features being built for PostgreSQL 11. I hope it will make a great database even better.

Moving on from headlines, let’s get to the real stuff – the meaty technical articles. :)

First up, who likes testing and benchmarking? One of my favorite activities, truth be told! So I can’t quite convey just how excited I am about the preview release of Kevin Closson’s pgio testing kit. For those unfamiliar, Kevin has spent years refining his approach for testing storage through database I/O paths. Much work was done in the past with Oracle databases, and he calls his method SLOB. I’m excited to start using this kit for exploring the limits of storage through PostgreSQL I/O paths too.

Right after Kevin published that post, Franck Pachot followed up with a short article using pgio to look at the impact of the ext4 “sync” filesystem option (made relevant by the recently disclosed flaws in how PostgreSQL has been interacting with Linux’s implementation of fsync).

In addition to Kevin’s release of PGIO, I also saw three other generally fun technical articles. First, Kaarel Moppel from Cybertec published an article showing much lower-than-expected impact of pl/pgsql triggers on a simple pgbench execution. Admittedly, I want to poke around at this myself, having seen a few situations where the impact seemed higher. Great article – and it certainly got some circulation on Twitter.

Next, Sebastian Insausti has published an article explaining PostgreSQL streaming replication. What I appreciate the most about this article is how Sebastian walks through the history of how streaming replication was developed. That context is so important and helpful!

Finally, the requisite Vacuum post. :) This month we’ve got a nice technical article from Sourabh Ghorpade on the Gojek engineering team. Great high-level introduction to vacuuming in general, and a good story about how their team narrowly averted an “xid wraparound” crisis.

About the Author

I have been in love with Oracle blogging since 2007. This blogging, coupled with extensive participation in Oracle forums, plus Oracle related speaking engagements, various Oracle certifications, teaching, and working in the trenches with Oracle technologies has enabled me to receive the Oracle ACE award. I was the first ever Pakistani to get that award. From Oracle Open World SF to Foresight 20:20 Perth. I have been expressing my love for Exadata. For the last few years, I am loving the data at Pythian, and proudly writing their log buffer carnivals.

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